Good afternoon, House of Madness residents:
Losing a loved one is arguably the hardest thing you'll ever go through, and whether it's a relative, friend, or pet can determine the level of grief one experiences as you pine for your loved one back, but what if there was another way? Instead of being gone forever, maybe just head over to some cursed woods where the ground is sour, bury Uncle Herb, and have him come back with the personality of a WWII Nazi. Hey, at least there won't be an empty chair at Thanksgiving, right?
Jud Crandall (Jackson White) has been stuck in Ludlow, Maine his entire life, and he wants to get out. Jud and his girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) have a plan, they're going to leave the state in order to join the peace corps, and start a new life. One problem, on their way out of town they spot Jud's old pal Timmy's (Jack Mulhern) dog in the middle of the road, and after walking it back to Timmy's house, it proceeds to violently attack Norma, hospitalizing her for several days. Speaking of Timmy, he's fresh back from 'Nam with an honorable discharge, but something seems very 'off' about the way he's behaving, and his father Bill (David Duchovny) is acting awfully suspicious as well. Ludlow has a dark secret, and Jud is about to find out that his parents and all the other adults in Ludlow have been protecting it for far too long, and now it's time someone put a stop to it. For good.
After that last paragraph, "Pet Sematary: Bloodlines" may sound interesting, appealing, intriguing, and scary, but unfortunately it's absolutely none of these things. From hollow characters to dialog they should have been visibly reading off of cue cards, the entire film is a whittled down mess, and brings less than nothing new to a story that didn't need fucking with. If someone took the dead script written for this ages ago, and then buried it beyond the pet sematary, this is the kind of filth that would certainly come crawling back, and now we're left with the return of a beloved story that we wish had stayed gone but never forgotten. Trying to figure out a way to send it back to Hell where it came from, however, seems like a job better suited for the X-Files........
Madness Meter: 4/10
NB
